your photo (and video) storage solution

Can someone share their photo (and video) storage solution?

I find myself running out of room on the 2TB drive way too quickly with the 21mpix RAW and 1080p video from my 5D2. I am using LR for the photos. The MOV files are stored along side with the photos from the same event.

Well, I have my library on external hard drives, and I back up to an external hard drive that is then unplugged. I only use my internal "data drive" for current shoots -- after short-term processing and keywording and such they get moved over. My external drives are set up for a year of shoots.

So do you have an external drive set (2 drives or 2 copies) for each year of shoots?

I find that I am running out of room on a 2TB for just 2010 with 2 months of 2011.

Well, I get a drive when needed which may be one a year. 2010 wasn't a particularly active year for me and 2011 so far isn't much either, but still maybe the two years will fill up a drive. Also, I have to be ready for when a drive dies (I had that happen last year) which means always having a backup on hand.

You sound like a candidate for a home media server. I have no personal experience with these, just have heard them discussed on various tech podcasts:

http://www.shopping.hp​.com/home-server

I have multiple LR catalogs but only the current catalog is stored locally on my machine. The remaining catalogs are stored on a NAS via gigabit ethernet connection so its just like a hard drive. The NAS is mirrored with two 1TB drives in and those are then further backed up off-site once a month to two more 1TB drives (in rotation). So in total I guess I have 5TB drives holding around 800GB.....backups suck a lot of data.
Oh yeah I also have "every" photo ever taken stored on DVD which just contains the RAW images (un-processed) as they come out of the camera and use LRs excellent "copy backup version to..." feature to accomplish this.

Having put all that in place though, the actual size of my real photo collection (LR catalogs, processed images, etc) is not creeping up that much. I would think that the remaining 200GB will last me another year or so before I need to upgrade all 5 drives. This is mainly because I store every photo to the DVDs but only select ones into my LR library (which occupies the drives).

How well does LR work with multiple external drives? How well does it handle different drives which may end up using the same drive letter?

Well, if you get your drive letters mixed up and LR loses its references to a drive it's easy to redirect LR -- if it comes up with a "missing file/folder" indicator you can right-click on a high-level folder and direct it to Find the missing folder and it does so pretty quickly.

tonylong wrote in post #11839821
Well, if you get your drive letters mixed up and LR loses its references to a drive it's easy to redirect LR -- if it comes up with a "missing file/folder" indicator you can right-click on a high-level folder and direct it to Find the missing folder and it does so pretty quickly.

That can become a pain if I have say 50-80 folders on each external drive if the drive letters get mangled when I connect one drive and not another.

I actually have overkill right now, because I just picked up a Drobo to handle this kind of situation. I have had three drives fail over the last two years(all different brands) so I picked up a drobo to handle all the workload of my main backup. I still save everything for LR on an external drive since I run everything on a laptop for now so until I am comfortable that everything is backed up on my Drobo I have about 6 external drive connected to LR at one time. LR can handle all 6 and the drobo with no problem.

My problem is ... I have lots of network mapped drive letters already. My external drives usually attach as drive E:, F:, G: or H:. (yes, the other drive letters are mapped to networked device over a VPN for my "day job"). Right now E: and F: are usually my card reader when that is attached. G: and H: are my 2TB external drives (H: is a backup copy of G: done weekly).

If I replace my G: drive with another drive containing old photos, wouldn't that mess up the catalog in LR? Any recommendations on how to juggle multiple external drives with LR (which potentially shares the same drive letter)?

How far do you want to go?
step one...catalog on RAID 1 pair inside computer
step two...backup of RAID 1 pair to external drive(s) drives may or may not be in NAS
step three...backup off site via internet, removeable drives, or lots of DVDs

I would suggest everyone should be doing at least step 1 or something similar.

Well, I need to correct that. LR3 does a great job. It is great at displaying each drive on the lt side. It is also good at dragging and dropping from one drive to the other. The only problem I find is when I have one folder at the very bottom or top and trying to move it all the way to the other end. You have to hold down the mouse button and wait for the computer to repond to your dragging motion to move all the folders until the mouse is over the folder you want to move it to.

JChin wrote in post #11839894
That can become a pain if I have say 50-80 folders on each external drive if the drive letters get mangled when I connect one drive and not another.

I have my shoots on a given drive under "parent" folders -- by year, and then current shoots in my internal "data" drive in a current shoots parent folder.

I'll say it's not often that LR gets things "mixed up" even though the drives periodically get powered off, etc. But if it does happen then it's an easy operation to get it back in synch in the way I described. If you have LR locate a "missing file or folder" by browsing to the parent folder on the proper drive then there is an automatic "smart search" to locate related files/folders.